How do you juggle the two?
We generally film between February – June, so each week I do 4 days
work at LEGO HQ in Denmark, then fly back to London, (try and have
the Friday off… although that's usually catching-up on emails day) and
then do 2 days filming over the weekend or longer periods of filming over
school holidays. and performance point of view, allowing me to focus on the design,
aesthetics, storytelling and playability of the models. She is an absolute
hoot, and we have a right giggle off camera, before we don our Judgey
McJudge faces for our deliberations. The other good news is we also get
an extra Episode this year so, we are going from four to five episodes, so
that means even more building challenges!
That sounds pretty exhausting!
It can be, but it’s a lot of fun and I really miss it when I’m not doing it!
Season 1 was extremely daunting, as I had never done anything like that
before, so I just had to muddle my way through it. Now I have found
my feet a little more and know the drill, things are running much more
smoothly for me. You had celebrity guest judges on Series 1, will we be seeing more on
Series 2?
You certainly will, this series we have Rob Beckett, Paddy McGuinness,
Chris Ramsey, Johnny Vegas and Sue Perkins… they were all absolutely
hilarious and so much fun to work with!
For those readers who didn’t get to see the first Season can you tell us
what LEGO MASTERS is all about?
Sure, it’s basically a challenge show were LEGO enthusiasts are paired
together in teams of two and are issued two gruelling building challenges
each week; one challenge is a surprise challenge which sometimes includes
a sneaky twist, the other is a planned challenge, so they can put their
thinking caps on in advance and scheme up their ultimate creations. The
show is just one of those really nice, heart-warming productions, and its
mainly the contestants that make the show what it is… having them work
in teams creates a really nice dynamic and shows what their relationships
are like. This year we have teams that are made up of a married couple,
kid best friends, siblings, parents and their kids, and also two fans that
auditioned separately and we teamed them up… so seeing the ups and
downs of them working together and how they solve problems is a lot of
fun.
So what can we expect with Season 2?
The aim has been to go bigger and better, so we have tougher challenges,
more jeopardy… which has of course resulted in some epic smashes and a
lot more tears (mainly mine (again)) Yup, there will be more ugly Ashton
crying on your screens pretty soon. I’m terrible, I can’t help it, all the
teams are so lovely and talented, I never want to send anyone home (I
think I maybe in the wrong job)… there was one particularly tough week
this season, were I started blubbing before Melvin even started saying ‘and
the teams GOING THROUGH to next week are… I’m ridiculous!)
There are also several new things about the show; I now have a permanent
co-judge’ Fran Scott (my new telly wife), she is amazing! Fran comes
from a science and engineering background, and specializes in creating
dynamic demos for science shows were she generally likes blowing things
up, so she is great at judging all the models from a functionality, structural
So when will we get to see it?
The airing date is still to be decided, but I have been told it will hit our
screens in early November, so please keep a look-out for Channel 4 TV
listings.
So any other tid-bits of LEGO News to share?
Errrm… not really sure what I can talk about as everything we have in
development is so top-secret :/ Oh! One thing I can talk about is that
our little ‘Princess of Positivity’ Unikitty (who I designed for the LEGO
Movie) now has her own spin-off cartoon series on Cartoon Network.
It’s totes adorbs and is completely hilarious. The stories take in place in
a magical world called ‘Unikingdom’ (obvs), where Unikitty and her
little bro ‘Puppycorn’ endeavour to restore positivity after the countless
schemes from their meddling under-world neighbours who live in the
dark and gloomy city of ‘Frown Town’.
So, with all of this going on, do you ever have time to make it back to
the Wirral?
Yes, miraculously I have made it back three times since we spoke last, I
was home over Christmas catching up with friends and family, which was
lovely! Then I had the weekend of the Royal Wedding off, so I flew home
to my parents for that, if you are going to watch a Royal Wedding, the
only person you should really be doing that with is your mum, right? And
then last but not least I popped back to meet my new baby niece! Aaaah!
If you would like to follow Matthew to know what he is up to, you
can find him on both Twitter and Instagram at @matthew__ashton
(double underscore)
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